Here's why a war in Taiwan could be even worse — and more likely — than a war in North Korea

Military
vehicles line up during a rehearsal two days before Taiwan's
National Day on October 10 to mark the founding of the Republic
of China on 1911, in Taipei, Taiwan October 8,
2016.Tyrone Siu
Siu/Reuters

The first phase of the Chinese invasion of Taiwan could begin
with a naval and air blockade along with a series of
cyberattacks, missile strikes, and electronic jamming, followed
by round after round of bomber strikes. The second phase could
feature amphibious landing operations on some of Taiwan’s smaller
islands, a few of which sit just miles from the Chinese mainland.

If Taiwan dominates China’s regional military plans, you wouldn’t
know it from the conversation in Washington. For the last nine
months, North Korea has dominated American news coverage about
Asia.

The third and final phase could involve the immensely difficult
task of capturing the main island of Taiwan—no easy task given
its tight
military relationship with America, its professionally
trained soldiers, and its rugged mountains and dense jungles.

According to leaked and restricted Chinese military documents
gathered and analyzed by scholar Ian Easton for his forthcoming
book The Chinese
Invasion Threat, published Tuesday, many in Beijing
recognize the difficulty of seizing Taiwan.

And yet, capturing Taiwan—or ‘reunification,’ in the ruling
Chinese Communist Party’s parlance—is one of the main reasons for
the extensive military buildup of the Party’s People Liberation
Army over the last few decades.

“Only by military occupying The Island,” Easton cites a
restricted-access PLA field manual as saying, can we “totally end
the long military standoff across the Strait.”

One important and little-known element of China’s war plans that
Easton stresses is psychological warfare, or political attacks.
PLA documents, Easton says, “portray the battle of Taiwan as the
final act in an unresolved civil war and place great emphasis on
winning (or at least weakening) hearts and minds.”

Easton, a research fellow at the D.C. think tank Project 2049,
which receives some of its funding from the Taiwanese government,
writes, “while it may seem unbelievable to most foreigners,
officers in the Chinese military are constantly studying and
practicing plans for the invasion of Taiwan.”

Flags
of China and Taiwan flutter next to each other during a rally
calling for peaceful reunification, days before the inauguration
ceremony of President-elect Tsai Ing-wen, in
Taipei.Thomson
Reuters

Sure, you might say, part of the job of a professional military
is to prepare contingency plans for a whole host of conceivable
scenarios—which in the PLA’s case probably includes situations
like a U.S. invasion of China, the collapse of North Korea, a war
prompted by territorial disputes in the South and East China
Seas, and another border conflict with India, among others.

But Taiwan is different. Somewhat similar to the United States’
desire for territorial integrity after the Civil War, or its
western expansion earlier in the 19th century, the
reunification of Taiwan looms large in China’s vision of its
successful future.

If Taiwan dominates China’s regional military plans, you wouldn’t
know it from the conversation in Washington. For the last nine
months, North Korea has dominated American news coverage about
Asia, as Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have escalated tensions by
hurling verbal salvos across the Pacific.

On Sept. 21, Kim called Trump
a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Trump, who earlier that week
in a UN speech threatened to
“totally destroy” North Korea, on Sept. 24 tweeted a
warning that “they won’t be around much longer.”

And it’s not just words: On Sept. 3, North Korea conducted its
sixth nuclear weapons test. The U.S. responded by stepping up
U.N. sanctions, and in a show of force, flew U.S.
bombers and fighter jets near North Korea’s east coast on Sept.
23. The public alarm over the potential for war with North Korea
is warranted.

Depending on how it unfolded, such a war could lead to the death
of thousands or even millions of people in North Korea, South
Korea, China, and the United States.

But war between China and Taiwan could be equally devastating.
There are three reasons to believe this scenario, in the next ten
years, is at least as likely as war between the United States and
North Korea. For one, the goal of “liberating” Taiwan is the
paramount foreign policy concern of Beijing.

And it has been a top concern since the end of the 1945–1949
civil war between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-Shek’s
Nationalists, when Chiang and his people fled to the island,
setting up what the West viewed as China’s legitimate government
until the 1970s. (Because Beijing insists Taiwan is part of
China, it does not call Taiwan an international issue.)

Taiwanese reunification and independence is such a sensitive
topic on the mainland that any polling on the issue is suspect.
Anecdotally, however, in the dozens of conversations I’ve had
with Chinese citizens about Taiwan over the last 15 years, many
of them supported reunification—some with force, if necessary.

The Communist Party ties some of its legitimacy to its ability to
follow through on its long-standing promise to re-absorb
Taiwan—it risks a loss of legitimacy if it continues to fail. A
healthy democracy of 24 million people, Taiwan belies the party’s
implicit argument that Chinese people need an authoritarian
government in order to flourish.

A
tourist walks under the lanterns along a street ahead of the
Chinese Lunar New Year outside Raohe street Night Market in
Taipei, Taiwan January 18, 2017.Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Secondly, the benefits to China of successfully absorbing Taiwan
far supersede the benefits of the United States of neutralizing
North Korea. It’s very unlikely that North Korea would ever
strike the United States: Its leaders seem rational enough to
realize that an attack on U.S. soil, however small, would be an
act of regime suicide.

If the United States successfully replaced Kim with a regime more
supportive of U.S. interests, or even more advantageously,
facilitated the reunification of the Korean peninsula under a
Western-friendly government in Seoul, that would improve the
United States’ ability to project power in Asia and constrain the
rise of China. Still, North Korea is a distraction, not an
existential issue, for China.

Beijing’s successful occupation of Taiwan, on the other hand,
would greatly improve its prospects for regional domination, and
undermine the United States’ position in Asia by removing
America’s democratic ally Taiwan and weakening Japan. And it
would ensure Beijing’s ability to maintain its trade links in the
Western Pacific in the face of a U.S.-organized blockade.

Easton cites a line from the restricted Chinese document on
Japanese air defenses: "As soon as Taiwan is reunified with
Mainland China, Japan's maritime lines of communication will fall
completely within the striking range of China's fighters and
bombers."

Because of the mutual enmity between Japan and China—and the
persistent desire for revenge from the Chinese public for the
atrocities Japan committed in China during the 1930s and
1940s—another war between China and Japan over the next few
decades is not as far-fetched as it may sound. And if Taiwan were
occupied, its strategic location in the East China Sea would
greatly aid Beijing’s ability to harry southern Japan. (During
World War II, U.S General Douglas MacArthur called the
island an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”)

What could set off a Chinese invasion? Beijing has long
threatened to invade if Taiwan declares independence—though what
exactly that means, like many issues involving Taiwan’s status,
is murky and open to interpretation.

The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), one of Taiwan’s
two main parties, skirts this by claiming in
a 1999 resolution there is no need to declare independence
because “Taiwan is a sovereign and independent country.” Taiwan’s
President Tsai Ing-wen reiterated this
phrase in October 2016, prompting China’s Taiwan Affairs Office
to retort,
“all secessionist attempts to seek ‘Taiwanese independence’ are
doomed to failure.”

On Sept. 26, Taiwan’s newly appointed Premier William
Lai said he
“advocates Taiwan independence,” and repeated Taipei’s stance
that the Republic of China, as Taiwan is officially known, was
already independent, and thus there is no need for him to declare
it.

If it so chooses, Beijing could start considering statements like
Tsai’s and Lai’s as de facto declarations of independence—and
respond with military force. Chinese military experts I spoke
with said that if war does come, it will likely be after Beijing
has at least several more years of improving its military
capabilities—possibly sometime around 2021, the
100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist
Party. (These experts stress it’s impossible to predict if and
when Beijing would actually go to war with Taiwan.)

Or Beijing could wait for a moment of relative calm. PLA
doctrine, Easton writes, likely favors “a minimal warning, rapid
invasion campaign that employs deception and surprise to land on
the island and overrun Taipei, securing the government’s
capitulation before U.S.-led coalition forces could decisively
engage.”

While the United States, along with nearly all Western powers,
doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the United
States has long had a close relationship with the island. The
United States continues to
sell Taiwan weapons, including a planned $1.42 billion
arms sale announced in June. And it maintains a posture of
strategic ambiguity about whether it would defend Taiwan in the
face of a Chinese attack.

It’s difficult to know if Trump—who took an unprecedented phone
call from Tsai after his election victory—would come to Taiwan’s
aid in the event of a military conflict.

A former high-ranking Obama administration official
once told
me “it’s useful” for Beijing to believe the United
States would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack—but he added
that it’s “profoundly important” for the United States to manage
the relationship so it doesn’t get to that point. His words hold
true today.

A
demonstrator holds flags of Taiwan and the United States in
support of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen during an stop-over
after her visit to Latin America in
Burlingame.Thomson
Reuters

The Taiwan scenario is so potentially devastating not only
because of the potential of sparking a war between the United
States and China.

Taiwan is a more formidable foe than North Korea, and its
geography—an island nation with dense jungles and mountains
covering parts of the country—would make it difficult to invade
and hold.

Throughout his book, Easton admits two important caveats. “All of
the PLA’s internal materials on the invasion of Taiwan are
theoretical, and its campaign plan is based on imagined
conditions and assumptions,” he writes. He cites Prussian Field
Marshal Helmuth von Moltke’s famous line “no plan survives
contact with the enemy.”

The other, most important one, is that although Easton accessed
restricted material he couldn’t find the Joint Island Attack
Campaign, a document, or series of documents, that “appears to be
highly centralized and updated regularly based on the latest
intelligence, weapons production, and lessons learned from
exercises and training.”

The most crucial information about an invasion of Taiwan remains
highly classified, and likely inaccessible to all but those at
the top of the Party and the PLA—and possibly, depending on how
successful foreign intelligence arms have been in China, with the
CIA or Taiwan’s National Security Bureau as well.

To his two caveats I would add another: The majority of his
important PLA source material comes from 2014, early in Party
Secretary Xi Jinping’s term.

Plans have almost certainly evolved since then.

Still, Easton’s book paints a much fuller picture than what is
currently available in English about China’s plans for Taiwan.
And it’s a reminder of the deadly seriousness with which Beijing
views the island. (Easton’s sympathies clearly lie with the
Taiwanese. For example, he refers to the date of a Chinese
invasion of Taiwan as “Z-Day,” the term Winston Churchill used
when discussing Adolf Hitler’s plans for a Nazi invasion of
England.)

Plenty of things could derail China’s future plans for a
Taiwanese invasion. Public opinion in Taiwan could shift
drastically in support of the mainland—or the mainland could
evolve into a democratic polity that enables Taiwan to declare
independence.

China’s economy could crash, and Beijing could decide to shift
future resources away from the military, reducing the likelihood
of a successful invasion. Or the two sides could maintain the
current rickety status quo—punctuated by occasional crises, that
don’t lead to war.

And yet, as China’s military continues to strengthen relative to
the U.S. and Taiwanese militaries, China’s chance for a
successful of invasion grows. On Sept. 27, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford told Congress,
“I think China probably poses the greatest threat to our nation
by about 2025.” In response, the CSIS China scholar Zack
Cooper summed
up U.S policy toward China: always important, never
urgent.